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The long-simmering dispute over whether reclusive Edinburgh University physicist Peter Higgs deserves all the credit for discovering the probable existence of the elusive particle has burst into the open in Nobel nominating season.

CERN, the European scientific agency which in July announced the near-confirmation of the prediction, stoked the controversy last month by avoiding the term “Higgs boson” at a conference in France.

Instead, it was called “standard model scalar” boson or the BEH production. Belgian physicists Robert Brout and François Englert published their predictions just before Higgs in 1964.

Victoria Martin, a former student of Higgs at Edinburgh who was also speaking, told the Sunday Times of London: “We had an email before the meeting asking us not to call it the Higgs.”

“Higgs is the wrong name for this particle because the paper where the mechanism and structure was first set out was ours. Maybe the name should not matter but it is not pleasant if you have done important work to be ignored,” Englert said at the conference, according to the Times.

Perhaps most galling, said Hagen, was the CERN celebration in July of the Large Hadron Collider near-confirmation of the boson.

All five surviving physicists involved in the prediction, Higgs, Englert, Hagen, Tom Kibble and Gerald Guralnik, went to the ceremony.

“Higgs goes into the auditorium and everyone is madly applauding. We go in and hardly anyone notices. I don’t mean to be condescending to my experimental colleagues, but all they know is they hear Higgs every day.”

What would he call it? “The standard model scalar meson. Then you could call it SM-squared.”

A meson is a composite; a boson is elementary.

“When I give popular talks, I call it the God Particle,” said Hagen. “I’ll whisper ‘Higgs boson.’ I never say that phrase.”

The word boson also honours a physicist, Satyendra Nath Bose, whose work (translated and published by Albert Einstein) on quantum mechanics created the statistics that explained bosons. He never received a Nobel Prize.

Among physicists, the prediction and its near-confirmation using the Large Hadron Collider is considered a likely candidate to win the Nobel, a crowning achievement for a lifetime’s work.

Should Professor Higgs alone claim the prize? Could the Nobel Committee diverge from its “rule of three” and honour all six physicists who can lay some claim to the discovery? If it’s three, which three?

Hagen, who has taught at URochester for 50 years, is convinced he and Brown University physicist Guralnik “will be the guys who get the bounce.”

They and retired Imperial College physicist Kibble wrote a paper published in 1964 just after Higgs’s work that also predicted the existence of the particle.

The contentious boson needs to exist to explain how all the other particles in the universe hold together and acquire mass.

“Six people did the three papers on spontaneous symmetry breaking,” explained Hagen.

Rather, he said, he and Kibble and Guralnik dealt with the problem of how you “avoid having extra zero mass particles that aren’t around. We look at it very carefully. Higgs avoided it.”

Now, said Hagen, some Higgs defenders contend “you didn’t put it in at the outset, so nuts to you guys.”

Most valuably, Oxford University physicist Frank Close, a prolific Twitter user (1,600 tweets in 11 months), had dismissed any claim but Higgs’s. In an hour-long lecture at CERN on April 18, he spelled out why.

“The work of the gang of six (as Close calls the group) has been critical” in what theoretical particle physics know about matter, Close said. But the bottom line, Close said, is that only Higgs predicted the “mass boson” that made all the difference.

“Unlike the Swedish academy, the American Physical Society has no rule” about a three-person limit, countered Hagen. In 2010, the society gave all six physicists, including Higgs and Hagen, its top award, the J. J. Sakurai Prize for Theoretical Particle Physics.

“If the Swedes come out in October and say, ‘We know better than the American Physical Society,’ they will be denigrating the coin of the realm.”

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